


Keeping Secrets

by platoapproved



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drama, Introspection, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Romance, Slash, Standalone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:43:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platoapproved/pseuds/platoapproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A character study of Captain Mike Yates and Sergeant John Benton. The hows and whys and secrets and circumstances of their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Secrets

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the anonymous kinkmeme on LJ. SPOILERS FOR INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS. Contains a brief mention of underage and tiny hints at somewhat dub-con if you squint and twist your head to the side, but I figure it's better to err on the side of over-warning.

He’d always been pretty. Bird-boned, his mother commented, as his father frowned around his pipe, pretending not to listen. Their house was a cold and silent, too big for them, with empty rooms full of yellowing journals and magazines in boxes, gloves that his mother had begun knitting and forgotten. His father was often away, or else locked in his room writing, travel books for middle class British families. Families like them.  
  
There were no other children his age in the village where he spent his childhood. He played alone in the brambles of the back garden, making imaginary rifles from sticks and tins and rusted bicycle spokes. Some days his mother would look out the window and observe his long, solemn, solitary war games. In short pants, with mud smeared on his cheeks for authenticity, he ducked behind decorative urns for cover, making machine gun noises with his mouth and aiming at invisible Nazis in the bluebells. He knew that his mother was sad, without understanding why. As soon as the sun sank below the horizon, her voice would resurface in hopeful love.  
  
“Michael! Michael!”  
  
Sometimes he would pretend not to hear her out of spite.  
  
-  
  
His sisters’ names were Elizabeth, Alice, Susan, and Anne Benton, and his mother was Marie. His dead father’s photo on the mantelpiece was the only thing in the house which was never allowed to collect dust.  
  
John Benton grew up in an atmosphere of ceaseless conversation and conservation. They never had enough of anything, except noise; never enough butter for everyone’s toast, never enough sugar for everyone’s tea, never enough money for new clothes when he grew two feet in two months and towered over his mother and sisters like a giant. He started working at thirteen, odd jobs here and there, to help out. When he lied about his age, none of the men believed him, but they humored and hired him. He was a good worker, a clean and quiet and masculine boy, who didn’t skive off to be with friends and didn’t question them and didn’t leave things half-done.   
  
His mother told him he didn’t have to work, and he didn’t listen. He knew that he had to work, because it was right, because he was oldest and the man of the household.  
  
Mrs. Benton had headaches nearly every night. He worked longer hours, slept guiltily in the back of his classes, observed with internal discomfort as his hands became big and strong and restless. There was never enough privacy in their tiny flat, in the days when his body in constant revolt, demanding attention. He listened to the lewd jokes and innuendos and inquiries of his various employers with ill-concealed distress. Their good-intentioned attempts to relate to a boy his age through the common denominator of sex only embarrassed him. He didn’t have time for a girlfriend. As he watched his friends pairing off, he felt no jealousy: just detachment, and an inexplicable feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.  
  
-  
  
They liked each other from the moment they met. Benton liked Captain Yates because he didn’t bark his orders and because he didn’t seem to notice or care that he was slimmer and paler than the other soldiers. He had a way of pausing before he spoke and considering his words, an intelligence and alertness that was softened by his quickness to smile. Benton felt immediately, without logic or hesitation, that Captain Yates was the type of man he would like to rely on in times of danger, to obey without question and protect when things got a bit messy.  
  
Mike Yates liked his new sergeant’s steadiness, liked the breadth of his chest, his obvious shyness and gentleness and self-deprecation. Yates was used to resentment from the men he commanded — rough men, with alcohol on their breath and chips on their shoulders. They didn’t like taking orders from someone like him, hated his accent and his bone structure and most of all his indifference to their hate. Sometimes he wondered if they could sense something  _off_  about him. If they could smell it, infer it from his mannerisms.  
  
He’d wondered the same thing at boarding school, when the older boys who were interested always seemed to find him. There were never rumors: he was too careful for that. He kept evidence and items for blackmail, just in case.  
  
-  
  
“The thing is, sir–”   
  
“Come on, you can’t just worm out of the question, Benton, I swear sometimes you act as if we hadn’t known each other for–”  
  
“The thing is, sir,” Benton repeated, speaking with the measured determination of a drunk man trying to appear sober. His cheeks were an attractive apple-red, the mug in his hand empty except for a film of eggnog. He stared down into the bottom of it, hot and uncomfortable. There was much laughter and movement around them, dancing and the clatter of boots on wooden floors, music and bright flashes of red. “I haven’t.”  
  
“What?” Yates asked.  
  
“I haven’t.”  
  
“You haven’t what?”  
  
And Benton wasn’t sure if Yates genuinely hadn’t heard him, or if he was goading. It was impossible to tell, with the Captain. Half of the time, Benton didn’t have any idea what was going on in Yates’s head. Benton thought of himself as a good judge of others. People trusted him and told him things, and he not only listened but remembered. For most people, that was enough. He understood the Brigadier, and Jo, and even the Doctor, in his way. But Yates was like an inside joke shared by someone else, repeated in his presence often enough to bestow it with familiarity but never fully grasped, always benignly exclusive. Benton could never shake the feeling that Yates kept secrets: not the inconsequential and shameful ones that everyone was entitled to, but large and fundamental portions of his opinions and life.  
  
“You haven’t what?”  
  
Best to say the miserable word and get it over with, Benton knew. “I’m a virgin,” he announced, resolutely not meeting Yates’ gaze. “Sir.”  
  
Yates’s laughter rang out over the party.  
  
-  
  
He’d only laughed because Benton had still bothered to say  _sir_ , Yates thought to himself as he ducked from room to room, searching for the absent sergeant. Well, if he was honest, it wasn’t the only reason. He found the whole situation hilarious and inexplicably infuriating. Why hadn’t Benton just  _said_  something before now, before Yates had been forced to pry the information from him? It was so silly of Benton to carry on pretending nothing was wrong, when the solution was so easy. But none of that mattered, now. Yates would find him sooner or later, and then he would fix him.  
  
In the dark of the UNIT mobile HQ, its instruments cold and still, hidden away from the Christmas party and its gaudy forced frivolity, Benton was having a good cry, silent and bitter, pushing the tears from his cheeks with the heel of his palm. It wasn’t that he’d never been an object of mockery before — he had four sisters, after all — but it wasn’t a feeling that one ever got used to. He could still hear Yates’ laughter in his ears, incessant and condescending and delighted at his expense. He saw himself with sharp clarity as a figure destined for ridicule and scorn, a caricature, awkward and insufficient, incapable of earning love.  
  
Benton did not often indulge in self-pity, but he was drunk and lonely and exhausted from the rigorous schedule of alien invasions. When the door opened he shot to his feet, saluting by reflex.  
  
“Here you are,” Yates said, closing the door behind him. Benton recognized the voice, though he could hardly see in the dark. He sat back down, dizzy and miserable. He heard the click of the lock sliding in place, and then Yates was coming towards him in the darkness.  
  
“Do you  _need_  something?” he said, in a close approximation of insolence, too tired and too humiliated to care, “Sir?”  
  
Yates didn’t say a word. He crossed the distance between them with calm resolve, and the next thing Benton knew, he was being kissed. Yates had twisted one hand tightly into Benton’s hair and put the other, hot and narrow-fingered, into his lap. His tongue was in Benton’s mouth, eyes shut as if he were concentrating, trying to hear something very quiet or remember a detail from long ago.  
  
Benton turned his face away, breathing hard. “What’re you doing?”  
  
He got no answer. Yates pressed their foreheads together, keeping his eyes shut as he worked open the front of Benton’s uniform trousers by touch.  
  
“Sir–”  
  
“Don’t talk,” Yates whispered, running his fingers over Benton’s mouth, feeling the warmth and elasticity of his lips. Benton drew in a breath — he wanted to ask what Yates meant by this, to argue, to warn that they might get caught. Yates’ fingers shifted position over his mouth, just this side of a threat to clamp down if he said another word. Benton swallowed and stayed still. He felt himself getting hard against his better judgment. When Yates wrapped a hand around the base of his cock, he made a small and involuntary noise, a half-swallowed gasp. It was nothing like when he touched himself. Yates’ hand was smaller, unhurried and unpredictable. Benton kept his eyes on it, watched it moving over his familiar organ. He spread his legs wider on the chair, clutching its arms with white-knuckled hands, his breath loud and ragged in the small and dimly-lit space.  
  
Then Yates knelt on the floor between his legs, not meeting Benton’s eyes as he took him into his mouth, with practice and a degree of dispassion. Benton could feel the muscles in his thighs trembling, his fingernails bending against the palms of his hands. It didn’t take very long. He came with a muffled and guttural noise, toes curling in his military boots. Yates swallowed, did Benton’s trousers back up with unsentimental efficiency. The whole affair had taken only a few minutes.  
  
Without speaking, Yates stood up, unsmiling, with a stillness in his narrow face that disturbed Benton. Benton knew that this was a pivotal moment, that if he did nothing now Yates would straighten his uniform and step back out into the night to leave him here alone with his spinning thoughts and slowing breath. He knew without needing to ask that if he did nothing now, when the morning came they would not speak of this, and Captain Yates would lock it away in his mind along with his myriad of other secrets, untouchable, unknowable.  
  
“Wait,” Benton said, hoarsely, catching Yates’ wrist in his hand.  
  
Yates looked sideways at him, his narrow face unmoving, inscrutable. Assessing. Guarded. Benton remembered incongruously the way Yates looked with blood on his face, the bruises on his wrists after he escaped from the Master, the set of his mouth when he’d dislocated his shoulder and Benton had had to set it in the field. His face was the same now, the same suppressed looking of pain.  
  
He saw again, more clearly than ever, the sadness that he had so often noticed in Captain Yates’ half-lidded eyes, his reserve and isolation.  
  
“We both have leave until New Year’s,” Benton said, simply, “I want to spend it with you.”  
  
It was half a minute before Yates spoke. “Alright,” he said, apprehensively, giving nothing away. “I know where we can go.”  
  
-  
  
Benton ran his hand up and down Yates’ narrow ribcage, which rose and fell with a steady regularity. His skin was flushed against the white sheets — Benton kissed it complacently. With their legs twined together like roots he felt quiet and elated. He knew that this was right. This was perfect, was what he had been waiting for without even knowing it.  
  
In the sordid anonymity of the discreet hotel room, Yates rolled the lit cigarette between his fingertips, staring hypnotically at the glowing cherry as he spoke.  
  
“It was at school,” he said, and it was as though the words were disconnected, speaking themselves without his guidance or intervention, “In an equipment closet, with one of the older boys who would umpire for the cricket matches.”  
  
“How old were you?” Benton prompted idly, running his hands over the pale plane of skin just above Yates’ hipbone.  
  
“Thirteen?” Yates said, putting the cigarette to his lips and switching his stare to an asymmetrical stain on the ceiling. “Probably?”  
  
Benton stopped kissing him.  
  
“Thirteen?” he repeated, the smile falling from his face.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And how much older was he?”  
  
Yates couldn’t stand that earnest look on Benton’s face, couldn’t stand the gravity and concern in his voice. He blew an angry cloud of smoke, turning on his side, away from Benton, and stubbing out the fag in the ashtray on the floor. “I don’t know. What does it matter?” His guts were twisted in knots, his hands imperceptibly shaking.  
  
“Were you scared?” Benton asked, gently. It wasn’t the question Yates had been expecting. He got out of the bed, walked across the room feeling Benton’s eyes on his naked back, thinking  _yes_ , thinking  _I’m scared every time_ . He shut the door to the bathroom and turned on the shower so that Benton would hear the sound of the running water. He stood for a long time in the tiny room, naked, with his arms folded over his chest, looking at nothing.  
  
-  
  
“Captain Yates is the man inside who’s working against us,” said the Doctor, grim and to the point.  
  
“Come on, Doctor,” Benton protested.  
  
“I’m afraid its true,” the Doctor said, without an ounce of uncertainty in his voice.  
  
And Benton remembered the way that Yates had looked with his hair is sweaty swirls stuck to his forehead, the feeling of his stomach muscles clenching under his skin just before he came, his strange way of eating apples and the way he would hold himself when he was frightened.  
  
“Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like if things were different?” he had asked Benton, the last day of that week in the seedy rented room. “If it didn’t have to be secret? If the world were different, or if we were.”  
  
“I’ve never really thought about it,” he’d said, truthfully.  
  
“I think about it every day.”  
  
The Doctor noticed with interest how unsurprised Benton was, on the whole, by this unforeseen betrayal in Captain Yates. He accepted the truth much more quickly, with much less evidence, than either the Brigadier or the Doctor himself had. The Time Lord filed the observation away for later: there was a story there, and he would learn it in time. For now, there was business to be done. Sarah Jane was in trouble. Once again, the Earth needed saving. At least, the Doctor thought, Benton could be relied on: simple, loyal, uncomplicated Sergeant Benton. At least he wasn’t keeping any secrets.


End file.
